The cable car rumbles ominously as it carries us from the station in Towada-HachimantaiNational Park up to the peak of Mount Tamoyachi, in the northern Hakkoda mountain range. The dozens of goggled skiers and snowboarders filling the floating glass chamber hardly seem to hear ...

A continuous bluster rips snow from the white ground all around us and keeps sending it flying into our faces, as we stand on the platform of Kanagi Station in Goshogawara. It is frigid weather and I am relieved when I finally spot our ...

Euthanasia is an emotionally charged issue for people on both sides of the debate. Proponents of euthanasia argue that a person suffering from terminal illness should be given the freedom to choose how and when they die. Such discourse is given weight by the ...

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The path to the top of the hill in Kaibara town is shaded by maple trees, still fiery in their demise so late in the season. The smooth stone steps turn once, twice, before petering out just before a large torii gate. Beyond this ...

There is no embellished castle tower to keep watch over Sasayama, a city ringed by the mountains of central HyogoPrefecture. Only thick stone walls mark the site where an early 17th-century fortress stood. Even in those days, the castle keep was a relatively unimpressive ...

Mere minutes after the Sagano Scenic Railway train leaves its terminus in the popular suburb of Arashiyama just outside Kyoto, civilization abruptly falls away. Behind us lies a metropolis of at least a million people; out the windows, the only signs of life are ...

Just under a year ago, Rebecca Solnit, a writer living in San Francisco, wrote a sobering piece in the London Review of Books about the Google Bus, which she viewed as a proxy for the technology industry in nearby Palo Alto, Mountain View and ...

With the market now saturated, convenience stores in Japan increasingly need to upgrade products and services for the elderly amid the rapid aging of the country’s population. The convenience store business has grown sharply since the first shop opened 40 years ago thanks to ...

Blows to the head can be silent killers for which swift diagnosis is often the only recourse, say doctors. Even if there is no damage to the outside of the head, the impact may inflict catastrophic damage to the brain inside, they say. Because ...

Sitting at a plain white table in a meeting room high up on the 12th floor of a narrow building in central Tokyo, product designer Kenya Hara asks me to picture a shallow plate in my mind. “Now imagine a slightly deeper plate,” Hara ...

From burgers to ballerinas, LINE sending to gender bending, kawaii cute to Nadeshiko adorable, here are the life section stories that caught online readers’ eyes in 2013. As a gyaru might say, “Yababa!”

He usually has black hair and a black beard, sometimes just a mustache. Like Santa, he wears a hat — though often it’s a sombrero. He dons a serape or a poncho and, in one case, a red-and-black zoot suit. And he makes his ...